Intelligence Bureau's letter to CBI: 'David Headley told FBI Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber'
New Delhi: When officers of India's National Investigating Agency (NIA) were allowed to interrogate David Coleman Headley in a jail in Chicago in 2010, the Pakistani-American allegedly told them that Ishrat Jahan, a college student shot dead by the Gujarat Police in 2004, had terrorist links.
Mr Headley has confessed to his role in the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in which 166 people were killed in 2008. He has admitted that he videotaped the landmarks that would be targeted on behalf of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In an 119-page report that the NIA prepared on its seven-day questioning of Mr Headley, the agency recorded that Mr Headley said Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, a Lashkar commander, had told him of a terror operation that had failed - Ishrat Jahan and those assigned with her had died
The NIA shared its interrogation report of Mr Headley with the Intelligence Bureau. The document was also made available to the media. But in this version, the two paras that refer to Ishrat Jahan are missing.
Nine years after Ishrat was killed with three men on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, the CBI has found the Gujarat Police and Intelligence Bureau guilty of a joint operation "in close blood."
In the chargesheet it filed in court on Wednesday, the agency did not comment on whether Ishrat and the others were terrorists who were on a mission to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi, as alleged by the cops who shot them.
The Intelligence Bureau maintains that it had reason to believe this was a terror unit, and in 2004, its Gujarat branch shared that information with the police.
The BJP alleges that the government has deliberately withheld details of Ishrat's terror links to discredit Mr Modi and his administration.
NDTV has learnt that in March 2010, the FBI had independently warned India's Intelligence Bureau that in his questioning by US investigators, Mr Headley had said that Ishrat and her associates were planning terror strikes on Gujarat temples including the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar.
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